NBC’s Chuck Todd was the interviewer who elicited Obama’s weak non-apology last Thursday. But Todd got the distinct impression that Obama “does not believe he lied” when he made those promises about keeping your plan and keeping your doctor, period. Todd adds:
I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.
John Nolte at Breitbart finds that “bordering on pathological,” in light of the almost overwhelming evidence that Obama knew very well that what he said would turn out to be untrue:
Obama’s brazen and reckless lying is bad enough. But if Todd is correct (and I think he is) that Obama doesn’t believe or understand that he lied, that means it can and will happen again.
It’s not difficult to predict that it will happen again, because this is hardly the first time it has happened. But in order to understand what’s going on here, it helps to understand that Obama is a man of the left, and that he is demonstrating the tried-and-true leftist practice known as doublethink, as described by George Orwell in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell wrote that “doublethink” requires:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies…to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Obama has been caught in a lie so obvious, egregious, and important that he may sense, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he’s in big trouble. So if he’s incapable of sincerely fessing up, what else can he do? Create a narrative and hope that by doing so he can revise history. If he says it often enough, he can create a new truth for enough people that it gets him off the hook. It helps to believe that truth is merely relative—although videotape makes that a bit harder to pull off than it used to be.
Obama is also cuing politicians and pundits on his side, giving them talking points for their public appearances. He’s expecting them to exercise doublethink and get with the program, although Obama’s face and body language do not convey confidence in this approach, unlike his demeanor in the past.
The Soviets and their lackeys in Soviet-controlled countries would regularly revise history in order to eliminate people who had troubled them in one way or other, or to make themselves look better. Orwell further described the method:
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance…In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
We have not yet come to that point under Obama. But we have taken some steps towards it when the president expects us to buy his revisionist casting of his own prior statements and knowledge about keeping your insurance and/or doctors.
Whether it works or not depends on how practiced Americans (and the MSM) are in the art of doublethink, and how many are paying attention.
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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